Second-place recreation: "Passage on First Pond," Harrietstown

More than just a pack of pretty pictures, this year’s avalanche of entries made us dizzy with their evocative settings and moods, from the last gasp of a late-summer afternoon to the roar of ice-rimed falls to an intimate peek at the forest floor.

To help sort it out we recruited Adirondack Life contributing photographer Lisa Godfrey as guest judge. Godfrey, who splits her time be­tween the Philadelphia area and her Adirondack base in Wilmington, says the most successful photographs transport viewers to a landscape, an emotion, a “neat little moment of time in the Adirondacks.”

It took Howard Arndt, of Amherst, New Hampshire, days of staking out a nestful of great blue herons along the Ausable River in Wilmington to capture his grand-prize winning moment. Finally, he was “in the right spot, with the right light” as the hungry siblings anticipated their parent’s return. “Sometimes patience pays off,” he says.

First- through third-place honorees receive a commemorative piece of pottery by Sue Young, of Jay. In addition, the grand-prize winner gets free admission to this fall’s Adirondack Photography Weekend with Adirondack Life workshop, in Lake Placid, sponsored by the Adi­rondack Photography Institute (www.adkpi.org).